autumn yarden

We don't have much of a garden, but there are a couple of things that flourish. One of them is our comfrey, dug up from our plot at the community garden, and unwittingly transplanted here when I read that the leaves make great compost. Yeah, great compost and tremendously deep tap roots that are impossible to dig back out!  It's not that I don't love the comfrey - I really love that it still has purple blooms, long after my friend Jen's comfrey plant on their hilltop farm has completely died back, because on really warm days like today there are still bees and monarchs out doing their thing, and our comfrey is their favorite spot.

We also have impressive "poop mushrooms" that flourish on the presents the neighborhood dogs leave in abundance in our yard.  They're like little condominiums of fungi, aren't they?

Ah, then there is the horseradish.  Our horseradish did so well that when I ripped up the pot to move it out of the way for the house-painters this summer, the plant in the pot died, but there were so many healthy roots left in the ground that a whole new village of horseradish popped up! My favorite part of the horseradish, of course, are its pests.  I know, it's not right, and I'm clearly not really a gardener, but you have to admit I have honed my ability to appreciate the littlest things.

My friend Molly, who has an admirable passion for healthy soil, has given me buckets of wealth from her compost pile, and along with the soil came a few volunteers. My favorite is a dark purple beauty from the mint family, called shiso.  Look who we found amongst its leaves:

Ani and I spent quite a bit of time this fall puttering in the yarden, taking photos and finding bugs. We harvested our abundant lemon balm and made a tincture for the first time...

end of summer toes

...and more than a few hours reading on our little stoop, enjoying our tiny kingdom.  I think that every year somehow our garden will transform into something respectable, but every year it does its own thing and the deer eat the morning glory leaves and the beans, or the hollyhocks just downright disappear and the milkweed I thought was definitely dead just shows up one day.  It's a ride, I tell ya. 

*I can't even pretend to understand what is happening with the formatting in this post! I've fixed it several times, but I SURRENDER! There is a husband, a cat, and netflix waiting for me and time's a-tickin!